News detail and comments

NEW SKILL RATING, LEVEL AND RACER CLASS SYSTEM

15.07.2015 Category: Site news

After almost 4 years we have decided to do a major overhaul on the skill level and racer class system. One of the biggest problems with this old system is the lack of transparancy, in fact hardly anyone understood how it worked. And it was indeed complicated. In short, in the old system we were measuring your performance relative to others in the same skill level group, if you did better than average your skill level would go up, when worse than average it went down. It was more complicated than this but in essence that is how it worked.

The new system is much simpler and more transparent. We measure your skill rating for each event, we calculate your skill level as an average of your last 5 skill ratings, and based on your current skill level at the end of a season we will change your racer class up or down or it stays the same.

CAR CLASS SPECIFIC
The first major change is that the skill level and racer class has now become car class specific. You will have a skill level and racer class for each class you race in, before we had just one skill level and racer class which applied to all the classes you raced in.

SKILL RATING
We now measure your performance at the end of the qualifying round (only in offical events in which you can score points) relative to the top qualifyer. The average lap time of the fastest driver is set at 10 (100%) and your average laptime is measured as a percentage of TQ and results in a number between 0 and 10. For example TQ lap time is 20.000 sec and your lap time is 21.000, your score would be 95,24% which gives you a skill rating of 9.524 for that event. Your skill rating is calculated for every official event and we will display this in the result overview.

We measure this after qualifying because we feel that this is the best measure of your racing skill. Also quite a few racers don't start in the main final round for whatever the reason, plus the grid start affects the average laptime as starting from position 10 on the grid could cost you 2 to 4 seconds already!

SKILL LEVEL
Now we get to the next step: the skill level. The skill level is the average of your last 5 skill ratings in a particular car class. In the results overview you will see how much your skill level has gone up or down as a result of your last performance.

RACER CLASS
At the end of a racing season your then current skill level will be used to determine in which racer class you will be racing in the next season. As before you can always opt to race in a higher racer class than indicated by your skill level, that is up to you to change. You cannot go to a lower racer class.
The 3 racer classes are divided by the following skill level ranges:
Club: 0 - 8.199
Sport: 8.200 - 9.199
Pro: 9.200 - 10.000

Of course this is arbitrary but it gives us about a 70-20-10 division between the classes which should be about right. In the future we may fine-tune these numbers slightly if deemed necessary.

FROM OLD TO NEW SYSTEM
We hope you appreciate that we have revised the system to create more transparency but also more incentive to do well in the events. It is obvious that converting from the old system to the new system may introduce quite big changes on individual level. You may have been racing in Pro class before and now you find yourself in Sport for a certain car class. As said before, you can still change up to a higher class. It could also be the other way around, you used to race Club level and are now in Sport. Your skill level indicates that you belong in that group, you cannot go back to the lower class. That would be unfair!

We realize it is impossible to keep everybody happy under all circumstances. It will take a bit of time for this new system to settle but we are convinced it's a much better and challenging system than what we had before.

IMPLEMENTATION
The implementation in a live environment is not easy, and due to the complexity we have missed a few deadlines unfortunately. We wanted to have the system ready before the start of the new season but we missed that deadline. As we measure the skill rating at the end of the qualifying round we have decided to postpone the start of the 2nd round of the current Season 2 events with 1 full day, so till Thursday morning, the end time will also be shifted 1 full day for these events.

We will shortly do a final recalculation of the skill levels of all racers which will result in new racer classes for all of the car classes. You will have time till Thursday 09:00 GMT to modify your racer class, we will notify you with the web and in-game announcement message system. YOU MUST ALSO DO THIS IF YOU HAVE DONE THIS ALREADY AS YOUR RACER CLASS MAY HAVE CHANGED AFTER THE FINAL RE-CALCULATION. After 09:00 we will recalculate the results of the qualifying rounds and arrange the main final heats for the second round which will then start on 10:00 GMT.

We appologize for the delays and confusion the conversion to the new system may have created. Such conversions aren't easy to implement, once it's up and running we hope you will quickly forget initial the hickups and enjoy the new system.

Posted by: Rudolf Aigner (TH) on 16.7.2015 10:00:53 (UTC)
Hi Pieter,
is the ranking for Kakegawa final or still provisional? I'm pretty much confused why I should race with pros in class sport.
Thanks for any clarification
Rudolf Aigner

Posted by: Rudolf Aigner (TH) on 16.7.2015 10:00:53 (UTC)
Hi Pieter,
is the ranking for Kakegawa final or still provisional? I'm pretty much confused why I should race with pros in class sport.
Thanks for any clarification
Rudolf Aigner

We made one important change to the system yesterday, the official events are restricted to events organized by us (not clubs) and in which you can earn points. Events like Weekly's organized by us etc. are excluded from the skill rating.

The reason is that in those 'pointless' events the winners usually have lower skill levels and this could corrupt the skill rating scores.

Posted by: Michael Walker (US) on 15.7.2015 14:31:49 (UTC)
Under Skill level. It states TQ at 20 sec and somebody does a lap in 19 sec. I think those figures are backwards in the wording. If you turn a lap at 19 then that would be TQ.

stupid me... they are backward. Have corrected it in the meantime. Thanks.